September 29, 2006

First there is a new revelation about Günter Grass. The writer who has only recently admitted to having been a member of the Waffen SS (more here), wrote two letters to SPD politician Karl Schiller in 1969 and 1970, calling on Schiller to admit he’d been an SA member (storm trooper): “Dear Karl Schiller, once more I would like to remind you of our discussion and ask you outright to speak openly at the next opportunity – and I mean publicly – about your political past during the Nazi era. The postwar generation knows nothing but placation, and inadmissible playing down of the Federal Chancellor’s past, for instance, with all the talk that he was a member of the NSDAP neither out of personal conviction nor as an opportunist. I would hope you would openly admit your mistake. That would be a relief for you, and at the same time it would have the beneficial effect of a cleansing rain.”

Wigbert Löer tells how the FAZ came across the letters. The young Freiburg political scientist Torben Lütjen discovered them as he was “carrying out research on his biography of Karl Schiller. He had already finished the manuscript when Grass acknowledged his own ‘mistake’. Lütjen had no way of knowing that he had discovered in the federal archives in Koblenz an extraordinarily intimate example of Grass’ talent for suppression.”